


Touch

by Etrangere



Category: Tokyo Babylon
Genre: Drabble, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-10
Updated: 2012-12-10
Packaged: 2017-11-20 19:40:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/588940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Etrangere/pseuds/Etrangere
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hokuto knew about the seals on her brother’s hands, though she would never let it show.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Touch

**Author's Note:**

> For elihice.

Hokuto knew about the seals on her brother’s hands, though she would never let it show. It was his secret, the one secret that he never told her, but there was nothing that Subaru could hide from her, and so she knew; as she knew every other parcels of skins of his body and mind.

She made gloves for him. Leather gloves, velvet gloves, white wool for winter, and blue silk for summer. She though of the fabric softly caressing his skin, enfolding his fingers like her own hand had used to, for reassurance.

Once, they had always been like that, always close to each others, always touching each others with hands or lips or feet. Children engrossed in the wonderment of discovering each others and themselves, of learning what it was to experience and care for someone else. After all, they had had only each others. No mother, no father, and only the distant cold voice of their grieving grandmother for direction. But they had had each others – close, warm and soft – and that had been enough.

Then Subaru had gone for one year in Tokyo; and Hokuto had remained alone. Every day she had applied herself to sew and knit, to make her first attempt at garments that she mailed him so that he would have something of hers close, warm and soft.

When Subaru had come back, he had been changed. Stained with scars on the back of his hands to be concealed and veiled, a secret to fill the silence between them and nightmares that woke him up breathless and confused in the night.

The seals were a barriers between the two of them. They separated their skin from touching each others as they had used to be.

It was a very thin barrier : she could still take her brother in her arms and comfort him when he was crying and discouraged. And she could make pretty clothes to mark him as hers, hers and not the seals’.  
But even though, she knew that the barrier would widen; that someday someone would come and take Subaru away from her. All she could hope was that this person would make Subaru happy, and care for him as she had done.

So Hokuto said nothing of the seals, but looked for this person and spent her time drawing clothes for Subaru’s wedding day.


End file.
